Saturday, March 30, 2013

A few theses, none too
controversial or not said before: Whiteness is a property, a possession, one
unevenly distributed across the social terrain. White supremacists tend to have
diminished access to the supreme property of whiteness. White supremacy is thus
an aspirational politics, one that attempts sticking close to what it
imperfectly is in order to become what it should be. It’s an evil, vile
reaction to the maldistribution of a mode of social power that cannot not be
maldistributed. The effect of the unevenly distributed racial property, white
supremacist politics will remain a possibility (and a violently aspirational
actuality) so long as whiteness continues to be a possible mode of being
social.

I’m offering these theses as
a corrective to the dominant ways in which writers and news outlets have been
approaching the White Student Union at Towson University. For those who do not
know, the WSU (a student group unrecognized by the administration) announced
that it would conduct nighttime patrols to protect white people (and, in
particular, the “virtue of white Christian womanhood”) from “black predators.” One
writer at AlterNet has commented, “It’s like they watched the Birth
of the Nation and thought it was a PBS documentary.” Another,
at Jezebel, writes, “The Towson University White
Student Union (WSU), an allegiance formed of supremely ignorant and bigoted
college students, has officially transgressed the border of deeply offensive
and trundled into the realm of completely batshit with its decision to form an
all-white campus patrol to defend their innocent (white) peers from the
threatening threat of black people.” Irony,
then, is one of the dominant modes through which the WSU has been presented to,
and critiqued for, the public.

Irony has never been a very effective mode of
redressing fascism. (Think Charlie Chaplin tossing that globe in the air, and
his later regrets over the film.) As I see it, the capacity to be merely ironic
about white supremacy derives from two linked causes—or, really, one cause
viewed through two lenses. Irony regarding racial supremacist politics requires
the distance from the scene that race affords; it requires, in other words,
being properly white. Being white here has two vectors, negative and positive.
The first condition of possibility for being merely flip with fascism is not being a PoC, one who might be physically attacked by these assholes or subjected to the psychic violence their bile might occasion. The second condition of possibility is the
maintenance of an unproblematic relation to whiteness. It seems to me—based on
tone and forum; I don’t know their bios—that the writers of the pieces cited above are
both geographically and existentially distanced from scenes wherein they would
experience a deficit of whiteness. The pieces are enunciated from a position in
and around proper whiteness, where a white college-educated person’s access to
whiteness goes unquestioned—the urban Northeast. To even begin to analyze white
supremacist politics, we need to account for the striations of whiteness, the
ways in which a host of social levers—space, class, gender, sexuality—distribute
whiteness across the social.

A merely ironic disposition toward white
supremacist politics is only available to those who possess whiteness supreme.
The desire for whiteness does not make sense to those who have it. Consider
Jezebel’s description of the WSU:

This
belief [in white superiority] epitomizes a ridiculously antiquated racial
hierarchy, in which white men alone are constitutive of civil society — which
exists solely for their benefit — and African-Americans are perpetual outsiders
who can only benefit the white society from which they are excluded by having
their labor exploited, otherwise they're merely a menace to the established
order.

White supremacy is here coded as an ideology, a
belief. What’s astonishing to me is that the writer’s reduction of white
supremacy to ideology actually results in her describing, with some realism,
the material structure of a society in which whites (and white men) do reign supreme, do have power
concentrated in their hands. Weeks after the murder of Kimani Gray, after which
black protestors excoriated police for materializing black exclusion from the
social, can one possibly say that blacks—especially in New York—are not outsiders vis-à-vis the
white-dominated social? Desirous of patrolling a Baltimore burb with
“nonlethal” weapons, the WSU really just wants what white liberals in
Bloomberg’s New York already possess—it’s merely that New Yorkers’ property in whiteness is more or less unconsciously embodied, a possession assumed and assured. White supremacists’
desire for the very denegated structure of racial-rule possessed by
Northeastern urban whites exposes this structure, and this exposure is managed by
irony. This irony doesn’t offer a critique of whiteness, still less a radical
attempt to undo it. Rather, such irony merely reinscribes the distance between
zones of aspirational whiteness and zones of achieved and non-problematic
whiteness, between zones of white supremacy and zones of whiteness supreme. Liberal irony reproduces the structural conditions for white supremacist politics.

My aim here isn’t to pile on this writer; still
less (and this should be obvious, but you never know) is it to apologize for
white supremacists. It’s rather to say that we cannot treat white supremacist
politics in a merely ironic mode without a) reinscribing but denegating whiteness
and b) failing to attend to the actual gravity of white supremacist organizing.
Sure, the WSU appears clownish, “ignorant,” and silly, “antiquated” and not hep
to our post-racial times. They wouldn’t fit in in white Brooklyn. To treat such
politics as merely silly, however, is itself a position derived from racial
privilege (like it or not, laugh at it or not, white libs, the WSU is out to
protect you). Moreover, there is no
white supremacist group that does not
appear silly, ignorant, or clownish. I promise. Read their websites (I won’t
link to them), check out updates on white supremacist actions from your local
antifa or ARA group’s blog. They seem ridiculous, vile, and inept. The problem,
though, is that three boneheads gathered together do not require much in the
way of brains or organizational chops to beat the shit out of the next PoC they
happen across. Wade
Michael Page (the Sikh temple shooter), for instance, was a white supremacist
who travelled with groups as ridiculous and dinky as the WSU. Fascism starts
small. White supremacy thrives in the comedic social zone assigned to it by the
liberal-dominant, but it takes very little for the farce of white robes, shaved
heads, and bad angry music to convert to tragedy. Whether gathering to ineptly
organize a political rally, going to a white power punk show, or just having a
beer, any gathering of white
supremacists poses an immediate threat to people of color. Antifa and ARA
direct action people know this, some act on it, and some languish in prison for
having so acted.

It’s simple, really: White supremacy isn’t
funny, and it can’t be counteracted with irony. Such irony is enabled by the
very social structure to which not-quite-white white supremacists aspire. If
you’re committed to eradicating white supremacist politics, work toward
eradicating whiteness. (That, of course, is less simple.) And, if you’re in Baltimore, stand up to the boneheads.

[Edit: White supremacist comments will be deleted. If you wish to spew nonsense at me, you can email me at chtaylor@uchicago.edu. Or come by my office hours. I know, I know, emailing is less anonymous than commenting anonymously. My apologies. And (for those interested) I'll have a reading list of good whiteness / critical race studies stuff up soon.]

Sunday, March 24, 2013

On Saturday, the group “Americans
for Free Speech” joined up with diasporic segments of the Indian right to protest
the Wharton India Economic Forum’s disinviation of Narendra Modi from
participating in the event. Modi had been disinvited due to a protest
raised by various segments of a U.S. and South Asian left (myself included) who
did not want the Islamaphobic Chief Magistrate of Gujarat, culpable in some
manner for a 2002 pogrom against Gujarati Muslims, to purify his personal
record and legitimate his Hindutva-plus-neoliberal-technocratic development
policies under the sign of “Wharton.” And so the protestors marched, claiming
that we denied Modi his right to free speech (I write about the absurdity of
that claim here),
chanting, “We want Modi,” and holding signs that put the Indian CM into a
common ideological space with Ben Franklin.

The iconographic
juxtaposition is striking, and one imagines that Modites walking on 34th Street revelled in the
comparison. Modi is, like Franklin was, invested in technology, in science; the
latter tied keys to kites and developed communication technologies and
networks, the former offers stunning, Thomas-Friedman-esque formulas like “IT+IT=IT.”
More importantly, Modi is, like Franklin was, acutely aware that nations are
formed out of and through a manipulation of a global/international fabric of
institutions, ideologies, and materialities. Franklin went to England and
France to constitute the outline of a nation that had not yet been formed; Modi
desires to go to the U.S. to naturalize and legitimate a Hindu-supremacist
image of a nation-to-come. Indeed, it is in the U.S. that Modi’s Hindu nation
can be pawned off as a nearly accomplished reality. The signs that his supporters carried read “Narendra Modi |
Future P.M. | India”; the mood is indicative, not subjunctive, as if his rise
is ineluctable. The sign functions as a request that local Philly audiences
treat the transnational collectivity of U.S-Indian right-wingers as proleptically
representative of the Indian nation and so deserving of the international recognition such a
representative deserves. The sign—and, more broadly, Modi’s invitation to
Wharton in the first place—isn’t merely proleptic; it attempts to produce the
reality it can now only project. The Indian right hopes to use transnational circuits
to secure the patterns of recognition facilitating international relations so
that Modi can turn to his national electorate and pass himself off as having
already been recognized, by the global polis, as India’s ruler. It’s simple
scale-jumping: you leap from the local (Modi’s Gujarat, say) to the
international so as to back-form the national. (That somewhat obscure senator from Illinois, Barack Obama,
did something similar with his trip to Europe during his first campaign.) The key
to such scale-jumping is that sites of transnational connection (Modi at
Wharton in Philly, Obama in Berlin) need to be coded and re-figured as scenes
of incipient international recognition. Otherwise, Modi would simply appear as
another rando addressing a foreign crowd with platitudes about India, the
internet, and what he calls democracy.

What has astonished me is
the extent to which Modi is successful in this operation. It is partially a problem
of the nearly non-existent transnational competencies possessed by your average
Yankee. Students at Penn—particularly, those running the student paper—can’t
wrap their heads around the idea that, in this case, Penn and Wharton are not local sites embedded within the U.S. but are rather scenes of a
transnational struggle with potentially extraordinary ramifications for India. But
the provincialism of Yankees is exacerbated by a certain form of
liberal-postcolonial normativity. Consider this counter-factual case: the Penn students,
professors, and administrators who support protests against Modi’s
disinvitation in the name of “free speech” would (I think) be unwilling to
support, say, a propagandistic presentation from a member of the Greek Golden
Dawn on campus. I think that they would be able to see that allowing such a
presentation would be tantamount to legitimating and supporting Greek fascism.
But the BJP is no less vicious than Golden Dawn. How, then, to account for this
discrepancy between (possible) receptions? Aside from the BJP’s possession of a
better propaganda machine, aside from the fact that BJP supporters are enrolled
at and teach at Penn, I want to suggest that a certain form of postcolonial
normativity inhibits U.S. liberals from protesting and preventing their
manipulation by Modi. The soft postcolonial normativity of the U.S.’s liberal
public sphere enables India’s diasporic right to achieve incipiently
international recognition for its racial-nationalist aims.

We can see this dynamic at work in Rajiv Malhotra’s
article, “The
Hijacking of Wharton.” A crazy conservative, Malhotra is syndicated on the supposedly progressive Huffington
Post. To be blunt, Malhotra is a moron, and he has a made a career of deploying
postcolonial critique for crazy Hindu-right ends. Malhotra is just outraged that “Indian professors
specialize in scholarship criticizing colonialism” (he’s talking about my
teachers and friends) could be complicit in “serving…American policies on
interventions in India.” Malhotra calls my teachers and friends “sepoys,” a
term he helpfully glosses in parentheses: “(The sepoys were Indian soldiers
serving the British army to fight against other Indians.)” A few things are
happening here. First and foremost, Malhotra assumes an audience entirely
unfamiliar with South Asian history; anyone with the barest modicum of
knowledge would not need “sepoy” glossed (or, indeed, would accept so
inadequate a gloss). Malhotra hopes to capitalize on the ignorance of the
average HuffPo reader. Second, Malhotra abstracts what was a transnational
dispute between a transnational South Asian left (with Yankee allies) and a
transnational Indian right (with Yankee allies) into the international field,
coding the dispute over Modi speaking at Wharton as having taken place “in
India” and as a struggle between the Indian nation and Yankee imperialists.
Third, Malhotra uses anti- and postcolonial symbolics to transform race into
the bedrock of the nation and so as a regulative principle for international
relations. Think about how Malhotra defines and uses the figure of the sepoy.
Given the uneven and complex political cartography of 18th and 19th
century South Asia, it’s difficult to understand how a sepoy could recognize
himself as an “Indian” conscripted to “fight against other Indians.” But that’s
no problem for Malhotra, for whom Indianness functions as a racial essence; it’s
there even when it isn’t or could not be. In yesteryear, British colonialism
prevented this racial nation from achieving full institutional positivity;
today, it is race-traitorish “sepoys” like my friends and teachers who inhibit
India’s ability to become a fully sovereign India (which means an India in
which non-Hindus know, or are put in, their place). By returning to the
cathected symbolics of colonialism, Malhotra can code the Hindu right’s
blockage from circuits of transnational power (Modi's disinvitation) as an international and
imperialist denial of Indian sovereignty. Malhotra’s message to a liberal
Yankee public is clear: Keep your hands off India, let it “be different” (as
one of his book title’s has it), or else you’re supporting a racist
neo-colonialism.

This soft postcoloniality
poses the moral and political borders of the international as ethically
impregnable (e.g., I, a white Yankee, can’t offer a critique of Modi without
being coded as an EIC operative) in order to provide cover for an Indian right eager
to deploy transnational economic and political resources for racial-nationalist
ends. Of course, every single postcolonialist ever knows that Malhotra is
perverting the legacy of anticolonial revolution and the ever-necessary
practice of postcolonial critique. If postcolonial critique begins with
anticolonial resistance to Eurocentric forms of power—political, economic,
cultural, epistemic, and so on—it’s very next step is to critique those elites
who, seizing upon the affective and ideological rush of anticipated
sovereignty, transform anticolonial revolt and access to global capital into a
process of inegalitarian nation-state-building. Malhotra holds onto the first,
necessary moment, using anticolonial negation asa means
to assert a multicultural right to hard-right difference. He seizes upon
aspects of 90s poco/multiculti theory, a theory that valued the difference of
dispersed particularities, in order to justify the will-to-power of a phobic,
violent particularism. He’s doing it consciously, poisonously, making a mockery
of the very real necessity to confront the structures of racial power that he
supports.

But it works. For a U.S.
public sphere, for well-intentioned liberals and college students who don’t
want to be racist or colonialist and love the right to free speech, such claims
are convincing. (I refer again to his early millennial—and
ongoing—critique
of South Asian religious studies, which [I think] knotted U.S.-based scholars
up in fear that this racist asshole was going to accuse them of being colonialist
racists because their scholarship could not be made to jive with a
racial-nationalism organized by a transhistorical
image of Hinduism.) The effect is that, in the name of postcolonial
difference, in the name of the right of colonized peoples to sovereign statehood,
U.S. liberals are willing to tolerate the intolerable, to provide institutional
spaces and pseudo-constitutional cover for a Hindutva technocrat with blood on
his hands. It’s not a question of “intervention,” as Malhotra puts it; this
shit is happening in West Philly. The soft normativity of postcolonial respect
transforms transnational interactions into scenes of international recognition.
Thus, the claim, “the U.S. needs to respect India’s sovereignty” becomes, by a
conservative poco sleight of hand, “Penn needs to welcome Modi.” By
legitimating Modi and assisting in the purification of his bloody record, such
welcome might end up producing the reality it assumes: enhanced by a positive
reception in the U.S., Modi might end up personifying India on the
international stage as its PM.

We desperately need to
update postcoloniality for transnational times. Not in theory (it’s already
there) but in our pedagogy, whether in classrooms or in the public sphere. This
is a boots-on-the-ground question: soft postcolonial normativity calcifies the
political and ethical purchase of international borders, producing what the
arch-conservative Burke called a “moral geography” utterly out of sync with the
transnational political exigencies of our times, and so inhibiting potential
allies from helping out. Indeed, those of us who organized against Modi’s
coming to Wharton were a little saddened by the lack of reception that we
expected from our friends and colleagues—people who, just last year, were out
and about for Occupy. I’m also saddened that anti-racist and anti-fascist
organizers are not more invested (invested at all?) in preventing the BJP from
using U.S. localities to gain enhanced power for anti-Muslim ends—they
certainly go after Golden Dawn. We need, then, to develop a public political
language for relating the necessity of challenging this pernicious form of
transnational right-wing organization. I’m not sure if the rhetoric of “fascism”
that some of us have been using—myself included—is useful, no matter how
accurately it describes either the existent phenomenon or anticipated project
of Modism. I say this because the sign “fascism,” in the U.S. public sphere,
invokes an event so horrendous as to be removed from politics and so (except
for antifa people) from politicization. The horrific grandeur of the term might
turn some off (“That’s an exaggeration”) or reduce others to quietism (“What
can I do?”). In the U.S., fascism is (for better or worse) in a museum, but
Modism is on the streets. It
walked across 34th Street yesterday, arm in arm with the U.S. right,
carrying posters of Franklin and Modi and racist caricatures of my teachers and
friends. College liberals clapped their hands, congratulating them on defending
their rights.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

How does it feel to be a
problem? Du Bois’ great question—the
one that, for Dubois, goes unasked or cannot be asked directly—haunts Robert
Huber’s recent article, “Being White in Philly:
Whites, race, class, and the things that never get said.” Many
have already
offered their
own critical
commentaries on Huber’s, well, racist nonsense, and many of them are fantastic.
Here, I want to track how Huber implicitly draws upon currents of black
Atlantic 20th century social theory in order to construct whiteness
as a kind of public disability. Huber’s piece tries (journalistically) tacking
between the sociological and the phenomenological, between an appreciation of
the structuring of social reality and the modalities by which social reality
comes to appearance. Huber’s piece should be located, then, in a genealogy of
black thought that might go from Douglass to Du Bois to Fanon. Black thought is
repurposed to construct an aggrieved white subjectivity. How does it feel to be
a problem? A white guy from the Mount Airy is going to let you know.

Indeed, the rhetoric of the
problem is set to work both in Huber’s piece and in the
justification for running the article offered by Philly Mag’s editor. Tom
McGrath gives two reasons for publishing Huber’s article. First, black people
have kind of monopolized discussions of race, and, you see, “to pretend that
white people don’t also have thoughts and feelings about the issue is
dishonest.” So, Huber offers to readers a kind of Cugoano-esque Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Race.
As a second reason for publishing the article, McGrath offers that “not to do
this story would be to declare that the problems of Philadelphia’s underclass
are theirs and theirs alone.” Apparently, the Philly poors are so poor that
they can no longer claim possession of their problems. If failing to publish
the story would be to cede possession of these “problems” wholesale to Philly’s
underclass, publishing the story functions as a declaration of proprietorship,
of property. These problems affect white people, too—particularly when these
“problems” become embodied and personified in people bearing black skins. For McGrath and Huber, the primary problem
affecting white people is that “being white” disqualifies white people from
assuming some form of public proprietorship over the public discourse of race
and racism. “Being white” means that you don’t get to articulate all of those
“thoughts and feelings” welling up in your white breast. “Being white” means
that the moment you try to articulate those thoughts and feelings, you become a
problem, you risk being racist. What McGrath and Huber are after, quite simply,
is a way of “being white” that is not “being racist.” They want a public
discussion where people with white skin can speak as white, as “being white,” and to have this racialized knowledge
accepted as a meaningful and valid contribution to the public. But, alas, to be
white is to be a problem.

So, how does it feel to be a
problem? After telling us that he lives on a “mostly African-American block” in
Mount Airy, Huber confesses:

Yet
there’s a dance I do when I go to the Wawa on Germantown Avenue. I find myself
being overly polite. Each time I hold the door a little too long for a person
of color, I laugh at myself, both for being so self-consciously courteous and
for knowing that I’m measuring the thank-you’s.

One can hear, in this
quotidian staging of racial awareness, of becoming raced, echoes of Du Bois,
echoes of Fanon. One can hear the opening lines of the chapter “The Facts of
Blackness” from Black Skin, White Masks,
the lines that resound throughout Fanon’s meditation on what being black is:
“Look, a Negro!” Huber feels a duplication of consciousness, he feels the
awareness that another’s eyes are running over his body, that his skin conveys
certain meanings. “Look, a white guy! Being liberal!” He feels awkward, he
laughs at himself. But this awkwardness conveys a deep anxiety: Huber knows
that all of his actions are scripted, that he’s performing a certain kind of
liberal whiteness, and he knows that the black people for whom he holds doors
know it too. When he “measure[es] the thank-you’s,” he’s not simply
disciplining potentially discourteous black people with his judging eyes; he
is, first and foremost, trying to ascertain whether or not he properly pulled
off the performances that being a liberal white guy entails. Huber, in essence,
is non-sovereign: to be a good liberal white he has to act in a certain way but—and
here’s the kicker—he is himself not allowed to judge the felicity of his own
performance. Non-sovereignty marks the
quotidian phenomenology of being-white-around-black-people. To feel white is to
feel compelled to perform a set of actions whose success white people are
constitutively prevented from measuring.

Huber, in effect, suddenly
feels what it is to feel racially marked, to feel that one’s existence is a
problem for reasons derived from a source beyond one’s immediate control. He
recognizes that the black guy passing through the door that he holds open has
him pegged, that his capacity for free and spontaneous action has been
constricted—so temporarily—by the fact that this black guy has a kind of
knowledge of the generic forms Huber’s actions can take. (That Huber has a
special kind of racial mobility, that he can drive through the ghetto and get out
quickly, that he can ask his son to move from his gentrifying but “dangerous”
neighborhood—this raced/classed ability to avoid
encounters is ignored.) The problem is that Huber wants to convert this
felt recognition of extremely temporary non-sovereignty into the basis of a
plea for racial sovereignty. He doesn’t want to destroy whiteness; rather, he
wants whiteness to be something more than the awkward embodiment of a
structural entitlement. He wants whiteness to signify a special claim to a
special knowledge. He wants whiteness to be a substantive identity in the
public sphere, one that can claim some kind of knowledge, some kind of property
in the common problem of race. He wants to transform the fact of passively
being white into an active identity: To fix the “problems” of race, white
people have to start being white.
Moreover, they have to be allowed to be white in the public sphere, to speak as white. As Huber relates, white dudes
are already speaking privately about race, anyhow (pooling knowledge on how to
say hi to people with black skins, for instance); this knowledge simply needs
to be made public. At stake, McGrath claims, is the future of the future, of
progress itself: “To not talk about race is to admit that we can never move
forward.”

The fantasy underpinning all
of this horseshit is that “we can…move forward” without the “we” undergoing a
qualitative alteration, that racism can be ended without whiteness being
eradicated. Let’s be clear: Whiteness has no future. Huber knows this: being white,
holding open a door in Germantown, suspended on the threshold, he knows that
his capacity for action is limited, that he can’t move forward or backward,
that whiteness can only maintain itself so long as it preserves a suspended
present. And note all the space-thinking in his article: all synchrony, no
diachrony: whiteness can only preserve itself by eliding open time from the
equation and distributing temporality throughout contained spaces. Huber wants
to think of “being white” as identical to being any other race (although, as
many have pointed out, he elides the multi-racial composition of Philly). Indeed,
as I’m suggesting, he deploys classic moves of black social critique in order
to code whiteness as a tragic form of epidermalization, a terrible denial of
his full range of human potential. He wants white to be (like) black, as if
race-thinking and the horizontal, non-hierarchical thinking of democratic
publicness were in any way compatible. They aren’t. Race is always already a
discourse and material practice of stratification, with White Guy sitting at
the top of the heap. The problem of race is
the fact of whiteness.

This means, well, being
white contains no special insights into race, it doesn’t offer a program for
progress into an anti-racist future. “Being white” in a publically active sense
or claiming whiteness as a viable identity will never yield an anti-racist
politics. Anti-racism is the dialectical negation of whiteness. There is quite
simply no way of achieving an anti-racist society and preserving whiteness.
Negating whiteness isn’t/won’t be easy; it necessitates a wholesale structural
transformation, from reconstitutions of ordinary language and social ritual to
massive politico-economic revolutions. It also necessitates that white liberals
like Huber take seriously the fact that “being white” offers no insight into how these
transformations will come about, that racialized people have knowledges (like,
say, a knowledge of Huber’s scripted performance) that people committed to
“being white” do not possess, and that people with white skins need to listen,
learn, and follow—not preach. The negation of whiteness does not begin from within
whiteness. It never has.

Huber is not alone in
possessing these thoughts and feelings, of course. The intimate public of
middle-aged well-off white dudes he writes for is pretty broad. I hate this
fucking article so much because he wants to conscript me, a white Philly-born well-ff
guy, into his public; he wants me to say, I hear ya, man, shit’s fucked up when
a field of being is marked as constitutively beyond the range of the
social-managerial authority constitutive of being white. The article will no
doubt be met with quiet nods of assent from readers in Center City, Bucks
County, the Main Line…a group of already privileged people will have learned
that being white entails even more privileges than they knew about: White
people should be allowed to speak with untrammelled authority about black
people, once again—that’s what racial equality is all about. The article will
be discussed at dinner parties, a reasonably priced bottle of wine in; it will
be introduced in a conspiratorial tone, as one white dude hopes another feels,
like he does, the burden of having a white skin. They will learn, together, that
the problem of being white is not whiteness but their not being allowed to be white. But a tremor of anxiety will
inflect the conversation, an anxiety produced by the only knowledge that comes
with being white—that whiteness has no future, that it cannot last. And maybe
one of their kids, home for the weekend from Villanova, having just read Fanon
and Du Bois, will tell them why that is so.